


Salt & Fire.

by blacklid



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-18
Updated: 2007-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-26 05:17:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/279127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blacklid/pseuds/blacklid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eight times things were not okay and one time it mostly was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Salt & Fire.

**Author's Note:**

> Anytime whiskey may have been heavily involved. Recollections are not in sequence.

At first, Sam had thought the realizations were symbolic, like a great epiphany strung across the conscious sky whenever he saw his brother’s back hunched over in labor and sweat breaking out at his temples. At the moment, Dean was hefting a screwdriver and cussing at a wiring harness bracket that refused to budge under his numb fingers in the cold. The heater fan had died again somewhere off of Highway 5 toward Ridgeway and Sam was standing in the cross breeze on the side of the highway holding a Maglight, protecting Dean as best he could from the wind while he fiddled with something Sam felt like he would never understand. Something about a _core_.

It wasn’t the least bit sobering to realize that Dean had 32 days. It wasn’t because it was about the fifteenth time he’d thought it that day. He bit the inside of his lip until it bled and then he bit it again. He still didn’t know how to take care of her when he was gone.

+

The whiskey burned as soon as it touched his mouth and if he swallowed, he might puke, so he whined instead, knew he could get away with it. Jo dug into his shoulder with concentration and tweezers and a pocket knife, scraping away at flesh and into nerves, into the soul that heard the echo of Sam saying _Jeez, you’re not careful, you will have to waste me one day, Dean_. He groaned, but not from the pain in his shoulder, and swallowed another shot.

Jo had loved him since he didn’t know when, he just knew, but Sam was everything. He knew she would never understand. He wanted her to feel okay, but he felt horrible and inept and not a little bit drunk, and grateful, and he fucking hated driving that trashed out car, whatever it was, except for that it was the quickest way to Sam, to saving him, to being real, to having a purpose. Whenever he saw Jo, he missed Cassie.

He kept numbing it one pill at a time until he found Sam. No more girls up inside him and finally Dean felt safe, Sam sitting akimbo with his knees tucked into Dean's waist there in the dark in the room with two beds, one of them empty, Sam's hand tangled in his ripped shirt and holding a cloth on his head while he tangled with a fever harsher than life.

+

Bobby owned some weird shit. He had more books than he could remember buying and he had more cars than he remembered towing. It was a vast expanse of knowledge or experience waiting out there and he was too old and too tired to remember when he had stopped thinking _so much to learn_ and started thinking _so much to do_. _A blessing for the young at heart_ , he thought now, watching Dean under the hood of an old truck, one that Bobby planned to give to John for Christmas someday, whenever the damn thing got finished, the same way he gave all the Winchester men a bit of the Dakotas for the holidays. It was high mileage, but it was sound and Bobby had designed a hideaway trunk of sorts to be fabricated into the bed. He’d handle that later.

Even though John Winchester pushed all his buttons on a good day, he loved those boys, and he liked to give them something that said he was there, even if he didn’t see them again for weeks, or months, or years. Dean was diligent and thorough, torqueing all the bolts evenly and asking Bobby for the right tools and making do when they weren’t to be had. The boy was a natural. He sure missed Sam, though. He knew from the hours Dean spent on the porch after a days grind with a beer or six, that they both missed him.

+

John remembered the first Thanksgiving holiday without Mary. Wasn't much. Little Sammy was almost seven months old and when Dean finally started talking again, he kept asking where Mom was and why was there fire after baby Sam and when could he see Mom again and would she be with them for Christmas. John spent Christmas Eve in Jim’s La-Z-Boy in the small apartment behind the rectory with a bottle and hoped that whatever he had to do right now, it wouldn’t rub off on his boys.

+

Dean wanted something, but he wasn’t really sure what it was. He saw it sometimes, after Sam left, when he was walking down the street or into a restaurant. But he couldn’t put his finger on it. Usually there were four of them. People, sitting in a booth together. It wasn’t necessarily a family, but it was a _together_. They were usually smiling or joking around. Dean sat down and ordered food and a double of the top shelf stuff, tried to remember what a _together_ was like.

+

The snow was stippled with holes and the stacks of cars were nothing but towers of ice. They staggered in from a hunt, had opened the door without knocking, and there was Ellen leaning on the table with a whiskey bottle and two shot glasses, watching Bobby play the violin. They just stood there gaping and dripping blood on the rug, clothes wet, shivering, holding each other up. Everybody jumped out of their skin when Sam coughed and said he might have to puke.

Ellen got them patched up and Sam didn't hurl after all, so Bobby had sent them to clean up so they didn't smell like the Swamp Thing, even though it had been a lake full of holy water thanks to them and it had killed the demon so don’t mess with what works, right? They gingerly stepped into warm, dry long johns, heaped together enough blankets to suffocate a polar bear, stole the whiskey bottle and set up camp in front of the fireplace. The next morning, Ellen told Bobby she could hear them chortling until almost three.

They had tapped each shot on the floor and matched each other until Dean swore that it would be his turn to not puke if they kept going. Then they huddled down in a pile, limbs propped on each other and tangled in the blankets. Dean was going to have to figure out why the heater fan in the car kept going out, Sam had said, because they’d replaced it, like, twice already and Dean had said _I know_ and Sam had said _did you know Bobby played the violin and hey, Dean, remember that time when Dad wanted us to take piano? You traumatized that poor woman._ Dean had smiled lopsided and said, _yeah, I can still kill at Chopsticks, man_. And then they had fallen asleep.

+

Bobby pulled distractedly on the front of his hat when he was frustrated - and he had a lot of hats. There was one from just about every place a guy could buy stuff from for a place like this, from the _All National_ to the _Feed N Seed_. Whenever Dean and John showed up, they both gave him endless crap for the dumbass cap with a freaking pig on it, but Bobby just huffed at them because it was his favorite and asked when was the last time they’d had a decent meal or a good turn at poker.

That was until the day John had taken Dean on a hunt and let his guard down, left him in the open too long. The boy had been torn up bad, John had carried him into the living room with tears in his eyes. Bobby'd held a shotgun on John that day and never felt bad about it. Told him to take the damn truck and get the hell out, go to California, leave Dean to him. And if he ever left his boys alone like that again, he’d shoot him full of consecrated lead and do the world a favor. Turns out he’d never needed to.

+

John was so close to finding that yellow-eyed son of a bitch. He had been closer than he ever thought he’d be and then it was all gone again. There was a connection somehow to the Devil’s Gate outside Sacramento, he had just felt it, and Bill Harvelle had tried to help him open it, get to the thing that knew where to find Azazel, but it was too much. They had been too careless or too indiscreet or too bold. Nothing they’d had could kill what they found. He’d had to point a gun at the temple of his best friend when one of them hooked him in the chest, tore him to shreds. What if Sam was never safe.

He’d never told Dean why he missed Christmas that year.

+

 _No more scams_ , Dean had said, his mouth open around the last bit of his burger. _No more of this hustling pool or darts. Nothing that can hang over you, got it_ , he’d said and Sam nodded. Not that it mattered that their records were longer than both of Sam’s arms and legs, even after Ballard had hit the delete button on just about everything but the hard raps. _No more. Get a decent job and stay safe. Bobby knows some guys._ Dean had uncrossed his legs and lifted himself off the hood to saunter over to a trash can and toss the greasy wrapper away.

And Sam had crunched half a burger neatly back into the wrapper and dropped it mindlessly on the ground, his throat constricted as he leaned forward for air, his hands pinched at his kneecaps. His stomach roiled and he had started breathing too fast and his feet shuffled wider in the dirt, trying to hold him steady before he swayed backward and the Impala kept him from sinking to the ground, his eyes anchored on a brown pebble in the dirt.

Dean had closed the distance between them in a nanosecond and went down on one knee in front of him. _Sammy,_ he’d said, but Sam couldn’t look up. Dean grabbed both sides of his face with his warm hands, his thumbs arched forward into his cheekbones and they had forced his head up. _No_.

Sam’s eyes had darted away and then snapped shut, squinted hard, shut Dean out. He hadn't needed to look at him to realize Dean held his breath or that his eyes were dark or that his jaw was stuck in an open clench: Dean thought he was having a vision, but it wasn’t, only it was. It was the same vision that had made Sam use three pillows to Dean’s one and prop his eyes open every night with the remote, flipping channels.

Sam had forced himself to breath slower, deeper, and lean less on his hands and more on the car. He'd blinked a few more times with his eyes shut and set a hard, determined stare before he opened them.

Dean had returned his gaze for a full minute before he let go, eyes piercing and his wrists tense on both knees, ready to catch him. Sam’s jaw had clenched and he’d blinked, but he’d held the gaze, so Dean had stood up, expressionless, and turned to lean beside him on the car.

Sam had forced himself upright, locked his hands on his hips, his feet spread apart, filled his lungs like a newborn and searched the azure sky for anything familiar in the clouds. _I’m ready_ , he'd said quietly, and felt his brother’s eyes grazing up his back, landing steady at the spot low between his shoulders. _So am I_ , Dean had breathed.


End file.
